Large Donors

What we class as a “large donation”

ShareGift was set up to help solve the problems of small shareholdings, but we do welcome donations of any size and frequently receive larger donations. We define donations worth £500 or more as large donations, as this is the level where it is practical for us to sell the shares donated straight away and subsequently make a donation to charities.

You may wish to donate a larger holding of shares to ShareGift if:

A charity you support is not set up to accept shares. Many charities, especially smaller charities, are not able to accept share donations as they do not have the expertise or facilities to deal with them.

You have a complicated share transaction and need help. We have years of experience in share registration and settlement, and may be able to accept shares other charities or brokers cannot assist you with.

You wish a number of charities to benefit from the same shareholding.

If you were considering splitting a large value share donation between a number of different charities the amount of work and the costs involved for you and the charities may be off-putting. We can accept and act upon any number of charity suggestions, and unlike many beneficiary charities we benefit from free stockbroking and custodial services.

You wish to remain anonymous. Unlike many beneficiary charities, ShareGift will only contact you in respect of the donation you wish to make. We do not send unsolicited mailings, and we do not pass on your details to beneficiary charities or any other third party.

How ShareGift handles large donations:

Our policy is to sell donated shares as soon as practicable; we do not take an investment view.

We make donations in round figures based on the value we realise for shares. We do not sell shares and pass on the exact proceeds to beneficiary charities, nor do we take a “commission” from the value of the shares- instead we make appropriate sized donations. As the majority of donations we receive come to us without a charity suggestion, we are normally in a position to round up the amount we donate to the suggested charities, but we cannot guarantee this.

We make our distributions to beneficiary charities on a regular ongoing basis. We will normally include the charity suggestions from large donations in our next distribution following the sale of the shares.

All the donations we make to beneficiary charities come from ShareGift. We never pass on the names of our donors to beneficiary charities or to any other third party.

If you wish to let a charity know that you have donated shares to ShareGift and suggested them for a future gift from us, you are of course welcome to do so.

If you would like to see a copy of a charity’s letter of acknowledgement to ShareGift following your suggestion, please let us know.

ShareGift is “cause neutral”; we do not make a judgement on the relative value of different charities, instead we give to the charities that donors suggest to us. We do however carry out due diligence on all the charities we support. If there is some reason why we cannot give to the charity you have suggested we will let you know before we transfer the shares.

We are delighted to help, but can only operate as described. Please be sure that giving to ShareGift and the way we handle donations is appropriate for your purposes. Alternatively, you can contact the charity or charities that you are interested in for details of their own share donation procedures.

For information on tax, you can visit the HMRC website or more information is available on our site here

ShareGift’s costs:

ShareGift makes no charges to donors or charities. Like all charities, ShareGift has to meet its running costs from general donations, however a large percentage of our costs, including all office and IT costs, are met by designated funds which have been endowed to us and allocated for those purposes. We keep our costs to a minimum so that we can pass on as much of our income as possible to charity. We already benefit from generous assistance with our facilities including free broking and custodial services; however, donations to help us continue to provide our assistance for free are always gratefully received.

Contact us:

If you have any further questions about any aspect of donating your shares, please contact us